Edit: I posted the first release of my theme based on the ideas in this post here!
Hi everyone!
I’m an Industrial/Product Designer in my professional life, and I was so inspired by @UrLogicFails’s fantastic new community icons that I wanted to try out some of my own design ideas for Beehaw.
First, I tried my hand at an icon for Beehaw. I’m endeared to the little pixelated bee-cowboy we have now, but my background is in cleaner, more minimal designs that are easy to deploy to lots of different devices. A good logo sets a good first impression, and I want new users to see Beehaw as a real, legitimate alternative vision for social media. I’ve tried to recreate the back of a bee, and used the wings to form a subtle letter “B.” My personal favorite is the hexagon bestagon, but I have both iOS and Android variations. Icon design is always really contentious, but it’s also really fun - I’d love to see other people’s ideas!
Second, I took a stab at tweaking the design of Beehaw, with the goals improving the layout and padding, introducing a more consistent color scheme, increasing legibility, and (of course) incorporating more bee elements. I’m working on a CSS theme that incorporates some of these changes, but others are beyond the scope of CSS injections and will require actual work on Lemmy-UI.
Light Theme:
Dark Theme:
I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I’m happy to share more if people are interested :)
Thanks for viewing, take care!
I think the logo is cool and I like the dark theme a lot! If I can provide one constructive comment, perhaps the light mode yellow-text-on-white could have a little more contrast to increase readability of community names.
My design background is in making silly memes… maybee the bee could have a little more haw in it so I “designed” this:
It think tweaking the specific shade of yellow to get better contrast is a good suggestion, I just lifted the shade from the community icons and ran with it haha. And I agree, this is very much a “bee” icon and not a “haw” one - you joke, but finding a way to incorporate a cowboy hat seems like a great idea to me!
Was going to say, the light theme definitely misses some accessibility standards. I’d opt for black text on the yellow buttons, and maybe tweak the yellow a bit darker for further readability.
Love the hat!